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Tip of the Day

When you’re a software engineer, the resume is a tricky beast. It can describe the technologies you’ve worked with, but can’t say what you were able to do with them or show a hiring manager how well-structured your code is or how scalable your designs are.

Hiring managers want to know how you produce software, preferably in an environment like the one they’re going to put you in. Additionally, they need to know that you can write code well, understand how to work on a team, use source control, and that you can maintain code you haven’t written. In other words, they want to see your work.

So let them: Provide your GitHub and SourceForge usernames on your resume so managers can see the projects you’ve worked on. Contribute to an open-source project, so they can see how you work on a team and whether you can handle having your code reviewed. That way they can evaluate your technical skills. Once they do, you may well get the phone call you’ve been waiting for.

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Sorry but this seems very unethical. You, as an employee, do NOT own the code or documents that you produced. They belong to the company that paid for the work performed. Any manager who asks for such samples should be told so.

Err, I’m sensing you didn’t read the article or you were skimming too fast. Here’s the second sentence:

“It [the résumé] can describe the technologies you’ve worked with, but can’t say what you were able to do with them or show a hiring manager how well-structured your code is or how scalable your designs are.”

I.e. you can’t actually show the hiring manager your code. Hence Ms. Powell’s suggestion that you give links to your own projects or submissions to open-source code.